Article Title Page Overcoming cop culture? Organizational justice and police officers’ attitudes toward the public Author Details Andy Myhill National Policing Improvement Agency, London, UK Ben Bradford Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Corresponding author: Andy Myhill
[email protected] Biographical Details: Andy Myhill worked at the UK Home Office for eight years, first on the British Crime Survey, and subsequently in a team specializing in policing research. He currently works for the National Policing Improvement Agency, a non-departmental public body affiliated with the Home Office. Andy has published both government reports and academic journal papers on topics including survey methodology, community engagement, community policing, and police-public contacts. Ben Bradford is Career Development Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. His research interests include public trust and confidence in the police, legitimacy and the idea of procedural justice, the social and cultural place of policing in the United Kingdom, and extensions of these ideas into the criminal justice system more widely, issues of cooperation and compliance, and cross-national comparison. Structured Abstract: Purpose – To test theories of organizational justice in the context of a police agency. Design/methodology/approach – Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to analyze data from a survey of officers in a police force in England. Findings – The SEM showed that organizational justice was associated with positive attitudes towards serving members of the public. This relationship was mediated by commitment to elements of community policing and, for community police officers, by general satisfaction with the organization. Practical implications – Our findings suggest that police managers committed to implementing process-based policing policies may need to ensure their organizations also implement internal policies and practices that are procedurally fair. Originality/value – This study is one of the first to apply the well established literature on organizational justice to the context of policing, and the first to examine the impact of organizational justice on alignment with community policing and the service model. Keywords: Police, law enforcement, attitudes, procedural justice, community policing Article Classification: Research paper
Introduction Recent developments in police policy in the United Kingdom (UK) have drawn extensively from the community, neighborhood, and reassurance policing paradigms. Senior police managers have stressed that officers need to reconnect with the public, develop strong links with communities, and move toward process-based policing, an approach which emphasizes fair and respectful treatment of citizens (Tyler and Huo, 2002). Yet, despite incremental increases in measures of public confidence in and satisfaction with the police (see Myhill and Quinton, 2010), resistance from within the police organization stemming from aspects of the apparently dominant ‘canteen’ culture (Foster, 2003; Stanko et al., 2011), is a frequently cited barrier to fundamental change (Skogan, 2008). There is a significant body of opinion among serving officers that is resistant to the idea that the police can or should work with the public in the ways current policy expects. Citizens are often seen as a problem to be circumvented or overcome, not as partners in a collaborative project to maintain law and order. At the extreme, some officers believe some people are beyond or simply not deserving of help, let alone suitable partners in policing activity (see Reiner, 2010). In this paper we examine how police managers might be able to influence aspects of operational culture that run contrary to the principles of process policing and thereby promote positive attitudes toward interactions with members of the public. We focus on the ways in which management and communication procedures can, when considered appropriate and just, encourage staff to identify with and adhere to organizational goals. The concept of procedural justice has been of concern to scholars since ground-breaking work on dispute resolution in legal proceedings in the mid-1970s (Thibaut and Walker, 1975, cited in Colquitt, 2008). Procedural justice has been integrated with the large literature on ‘organizational justice’, and numerous research studies have led experts to come to the conclusion ‘that people care about justice is undeniable’ (Greenberg, 2011). Organizational justice concerns have been shown to have strong associations with standard organizational outcomes like job satisfaction, organizational commitment, trust, and positive evaluations of leaders and supervisors. Justice concerns have further been linked to ‘organizational citizenship behaviors’: discretionary activities over and above individual job descriptions that benefit the organization (Colquitt et al., 2001; Tyler, 2011; Tyler and Blader, 2000). There is also a rapidly expanding literature on the ways in which procedural justice concerns shape citizens’ stated intentions to cooperate with the police and obey the law (Tyler, 1990; Tyler and Huo, 2002; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003; Reisig, 2007; Tyler and Fagan, 2008; Murphy et al., 2008; Hough et al., 2010). Surprisingly, however, little attention has been paid to how organizational justice might affect the propensity of police officers to treat citizens in a procedurally fair manner and thus secure the key outcomes of cooperation and compliance. The present study seeks to begin to fill this gap in the literature by testing theories of organizational justice in the context of a UK police agency. Our findings suggest that perceptions of fair treatment by the organization are predictive of positive attitudes toward serving the public. This relationship is mediated by alignment with community policing – a process-based style of policing that emphasizes community engagement and partnership. Organizational justice was also predictive of commitment to the agency more generally, but the relationship between organisational commitment and process policing is more complex, most likely due to the underlying and sometimes malign nature of police operational culture. Review of previous literature Organizational justice
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Jerald Greenberg first used the term ‘organizational justice’ in a 1987 paper to describe a disparate collection of concepts in research literatures spanning social and organizational psychology and organizational behavior (Colquitt, 2008; Greenberg, 2011). Research on specific concepts included in this ‘umbrella’ term can, however, be traced back as far as the early 1970s (in the case of procedural justice) and beyond (Colquitt, 2008). Three key constructs comprise organizational justice: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. Interactional justice has been further decomposed to recognize interpersonal and informational elements (Colquitt, 2008; Greenberg, 2011) Early work on people’s justice concerns focused on distributive justice. Most studies of distributive justice have employed equity theory: the notion that people compare their outcomes and inputs with those of somebody similar to themselves (Colquitt, 2008). Imbalances in the ratio of what somebody perceives as the effort they put in and the rewards they receive can cause distress and counterproductive behavior such as working less hard, or stealing from the organization (ibid). Research on procedural justice can be traced back to the mid-1970s and the work of Thibaut and Walker (1975, cited in Colquitt, 2008) on dispute resolution in legal proceedings. This work showed that people could accept unfavorable outcomes if they perceived the process by which these outcomes were determined to be fair. A key aspect of procedural justice is voice: perceiving that you are able to exert some degree of control over the decision-making process. Other ‘rules’ that have been suggested as integral to procedural justice in decisionmaking contexts are consistency (across persons and time), bias suppression, accuracy of information, the possibility of overturning incorrect decisions, and decision-making that adheres to accepted ethical codes (Leventhal, 1980, cited in Colquitt, 2008). Two further organizational justice constructs emerged after procedural justice scholars recognized that people may be as concerned with how they are treated on an individual level and how well decisions are communicated as they are with having control over processes themselves. Subsumed under the concept of interactional justice, interpersonal justice refers to the quality and fairness of the implementation of a procedure and encompasses the respect with which a person feels they are treated by an authority (Bies and Moag, 1986, cited in Colquitt, 2008). Informational justice refers to giving clear and truthful explanations about outcomes and the procedures used to determine those outcomes (Greenberg, 2011). Benefits, conceptualizations, and measurement Both distributive and procedural justice have been shown to have a strong relationship with job satisfaction, organizational commitment and trust, and positive evaluations of authority (Colquitt et al., 2001; Tyler 2011). Procedural justice has been shown in several studies to explain more variance than distributive justice in relation to how fair processes and authorities are perceived to be (Greenberg, 2011). Interactional justice, too, has been shown to have a moderately strong relationship with job satisfaction and organizational commitment, as well as strong relationships with trust and positive ratings of authorities. As well as these established measures of organizational ‘outcomes’, researchers have begun, through the lens of social exchange theory (Homans, 1958), to consider the impact of justice concerns on ‘organizational citizenship behaviors’: ‘discretionary behaviors that go beyond one’s formal job description to benefit organizational functioning’ (Colquitt, 2008). Experience of both procedural and interactional justice has been linked to the demonstration
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of such activity, such that ‘employees repay those organizations they believe rely on fair procedures by going above and beyond the call of duty’ (Greenberg, 2011). There have been several conceptualizations of organizational justice at both the individual and group levels (see Greenberg, 2011) that might help to explain people’s motivations for responding to justice concerns. We will concentrate in this paper on group-based theories; in particular, we will be concerned with the ‘group engagement’ model developed by Tyler and colleagues (Tyler and Blader, 2000; Blader and Tyler, 2009). Social status is at the heart of the group engagement model. A key element of the theory is that the effort a person makes in the interests of their (occupational) group is influenced by how they feel about themselves in relation to the group (Blader and Tyler, 2009). People who have a strong social identity relative to the group are intrinsically motivated to act in (what they perceive to be) its best interests (ibid). When people feel leaders and supervisors within their organization treat them fairly, openly, and with respect they are more likely to identify with the organization and ‘buy into’ its values, goals and methods. Fair process, neutral, transparent and consistent decision-making, polite, dignified and respectful interpersonal interactions, and a sense of motive-based trust developed by these processes, may encourage attitudes and values among employees that legitimate the organization, develop their obligations toward it, and promote congruence between workplace and personal values (Tyler, 2011). It is possible, of course, for the inverse to occur: procedurally unfair treatment can lead to the development of deviant identities and oppositional cultures. Different values and goals, stated and unstated, may exist at, for example, formal organizational and informal supervisory levels (Blader and Tyler, 2003), permitting the existence of deviant sub-cultures. More recently, Tyler (2011) has promoted the idea that a much broader set of ‘social motivations’ can encourage people to perform well within organizations and, indeed, almost any social group. The literature on procedural justice shows consistently, across many different contexts, that such motivations – commitments to the group, values, identities, procedural justice and motive-based trust – are far better predictors of cooperative behaviors within groups than are motivations premised on instrumental concerns about risk and reward. Along with the research in the wider organizational justice field, this body of work underlines that if police managers want their staff to identify with the goals of their organization – such as those around community policing and the fostering of links between police and public – they would do well to consider how their internal procedures are viewed by their staff. Furthermore, a positive social identity in relation to an (occupational) group can serve several important psychological functions for the individual, such as fostering self worth, making sense of people and situations, and satisfying the need to belong (Blader and Tyler, 2009). A strong social identity may also help individuals to deal cognitively with uncertainty in the workplace: about outcomes, status, trustworthiness, and morality (Colquitt, 2008). Despite the rapid increase in the size of the literature, there has been little consistency in how researchers have attempted to measure organizational justice constructs (Greenberg, 2011). Colquitt (2001) proposed a four-factor solution that drew on concepts from seminal studies and differentiated between distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. Although Colquitt (2001) found the four-factor solution to best fit data from two independent samples, other researchers have found that measures of interpersonal and informational justice are highly correlated; the two components of interactional justice have been found to be highly correlated with procedural justice in other studies. Tyler and colleagues have
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argued that procedural and interactional justice are conceptually similar and tend to routinely combine them under the label ‘procedural justice’. This approach stands them apart from others in the organizational justice field (Greenberg, 2011). Organizational justice and policing There is a rapidly expanding literature on procedural justice and how citizens perceive, and react to, their encounters with the police. Tyler and colleagues were the first to draw on Thibaut and Walker (1975) to explore the impact of procedural fairness on people’s stated intentions to cooperate with the police and to obey the law (Tyler, 1990; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003; Tyler and Fagan, 2008). The conceptualization of procedural justice used in these studies, in common with Tyler’s work in the organizational justice field, incorporates interactional aspects of justice: public cooperation and compliance are seen to flow from police legitimacy born out of fair and respectful treatment of citizens, as well as giving people a voice in their specific encounters with the police. The associations between procedural justice, police legitimacy, and cooperation and compliance have begun to be replicated in jurisdictions outside the United States (Murphy et al., 2008; Hough et al., 2010.) Despite the popularity of procedural justice in the study of police and citizen interactions, and the strength of the wider organizational justice literature, there have been surprisingly few attempts to explore how procedurally fair treatment of police officers and staff by police organizations might affect the behavior of those individuals towards citizens. Farmer et al. (2003) found associations between procedural and distributive justice and standard organizational outcomes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work performance measured objectively through officers’ performance appraisals) in a sample of police officers on undercover assignments. Tyler et al. (2007) tested whether experiencing procedural justice influenced stated intentions to follow rules in samples of law enforcement and military personnel. They found that procedural justice fostered legitimacy and social value alignment which, in turn, made people more likely to say that they would follow the requirements of their job, adhere to organizational rules, and voluntarily defer to organizational policies (see also Tyler, 2011). Finally, Wolfe and Piquero (2011) found associations between organizational justice (a composite measure of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice) and several forms of police misconduct. Specifically, officers who had positive justice perceptions attracted fewer citizen complaints, fewer investigations by the Internal Affairs Department, and had fewer disciplinary charges brought against them. This study also found that officers with positive justice perceptions were less likely to adhere to the ‘code of silence’ in relation to misconduct and were less likely to hold attitudes supportive of ‘noble cause corruption’. We have not found any other studies that attempt to integrate the literatures on policing and organizational justice[1], and none that examine the potential impact of organizational justice on police officers’ attitudes to reform programs such as community policing, or their attitudes to serving the public. Addressing this gap in the literature is the key aim of the current paper. Police culture and organizational reform That the interface between organizational justice and policing has been largely ignored in the research literature is all the more surprising considering the wealth of research on the strength of police occupational culture. Pioneering work by Wilson (1968) showed that different police departments could develop markedly different styles of policing. Despite this reality, classic ethnographical accounts of police culture, spanning the mid-1960s to the 1980s, produced remarkably consistent findings across countries and jurisdictions (for reviews, see
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Waddington, 1999, and Reiner, 2010). Several commentators have argued, in the UK context at least, that more recent developments in policing – such as community policing programs, and the recruitment of more female and minority ethnic officers – have made classic accounts of police culture less salient. Recent ethnographical work, however, has shown that some fundamental elements of police culture identified in classical studies are, in fact, remarkably enduring (Loftus, 2010). As Foster (2003) notes, the term ‘organizational culture’ is not pejorative, but the majority of discussions of police culture emphasize its negative characteristics and potential malign influence. Waddington (1999) highlights, however, how operational police culture may serve a psychologically protective function for frontline officers who have to deal with the problems and dangers associated with asserting authority over people at the margins of society. Others have pointed to the possibility of the existence of multiple ‘sub-cultures’ within policing with divisions between, for example, ‘street cops and management cops’ (Reuss-Ianni and Ianni, 1983) and routine patrol and community police officers (Fielding, 1995). The possibility of multiple sub-cultures notwithstanding, Reiner (2010) recognizes seven core aspects of police culture: suspicion, isolation and solidarity, conservatism, machismo, racial prejudice, pragmatism, and an action-oriented sense of mission coupled with an overarching cynicism and pessimism. It is this sense of mission that is perhaps most relevant in relation to the way officers interact with members of the public. Most officers view their core mission as ‘victim centered’ (Reiner, 2010), yet many subscribe to a legalistic, enforcement-focused model of policing that emphasizes ‘thief-taking’ (ibid), as opposed to a service model that emphasizes positive interactions with citizens (Wilson, 1968). This apparent paradox may be explained by the nature of officers’ perceptions of their crime control mission – a rather paternalistic sense of protecting the ‘law abiding majority’ from the dangerous, criminogenic minority. The enforcement style of policing, along with strong intrinsic and extrinsic pressures to be ‘efficient’ in relation to reducing crime (Skolnick, 1966, cited in Reiner, 2010) and the ever present threat of danger, can combine to drive a wedge between the police and public they serve. Officers may not feel they have the time, or indeed the inclination, to focus on the ‘process’ elements of policing that emphasize fair and respectful treatment of citizens. Moreover, the contradictions associated with exerting coercive authority over citizens accentuates the ‘them and us’ mentality that characterizes police occupational subculture (Reiner, 2010) whereby identification with the police as an in-group may be linked with denigration of the public as an out-group. In its most extreme manifestation, the ingroup mentality might cause officers to question one of the fundamental principles underpinning UK policing: that the police are the public and the public are the police. The underlying police operational culture can, therefore, be seen as potentially incongruent with process and service model policing. Furthermore, aspects of wider organizational culture are likely to perpetuate this mismatch. Firstly, a quasi-military organization such as the police has, in addition to considerable discretion for frontline personnel, a necessary element of ‘command and control’. It is, therefore, by its very definition, likely to score low in relation to some measures of procedural justice; in particular, the idea that employees should be given a voice in relation to decision-making. Secondly, pressures generated by instrumental, COMPSTAT-style centralized performance management frameworks may be antithetical to organizational justice if good interpersonal treatment is overlooked in the imperative to achieve results. Finally, police organizational culture may also score low in relation to informational justice: anecdotally, police officers’ requests to know why they have to
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perform particular tasks are as likely to be met with a blunt reaffirmation as they are by an explanation. The success of service-model reform programs like community policing may hinge in part, therefore, on challenging and changing traditional police culture (Skogan, 2008). One of the basic requirements of community policing is the willingness to work in partnership with citizens (Cordner, 2000), a direct challenge to the prevalent ‘them and us’ mentality (Reiner, 2010; Skogan, 2008). It is not surprising then that researchers who have studied police operational culture in detail have come to the conclusion that ‘the sensibilities that comprise the police identity can…undermine reform endeavors’ (Loftus, 2010). Integrating policing and organizational justice The benefits to police agencies of their officers and staff demonstrating procedurally fair behavior when interacting with members the public appear clear cut. What is currently much less clear is how police agencies can encourage the majority of their employees to demonstrate this type of behavior in the majority of their interactions with the public. We used data collected in a police force in England to test theories of organizational justice in terms of how justice perceptions might ultimately encourage police officers to display positive attitudes toward serving members of the public. Figure 1: Conceptual model Hypothesis 1
Organizational justice
Hypothesis 5
Hypothesis 2
Alignment with community policing Hypothesis 4
Hypothesis 6
Attitudes to serving the public
Hypothesis 3
Satisfaction with the agency as a place to work
Firstly, we tested the simple hypothesis that receiving procedurally fair treatment from the police agency and its leaders and managers would encourage police officers to display similar attitudes to dealing with members of the public. Hypothesis 1: Organizational justice perceptions will be to some extent directly predictive of positive attitudes toward providing a service to the public. Though a direct relationship between justice perceptions and attitudes supportive of serving the public is possible, the literature on organizational justice suggests that this relationship is likely to be mediated by employees’ feelings about the organization. Group engagement theory posits that justice perceptions will foster group identity. We therefore expect that perceptions of organizational justice will be linked with satisfaction with the agency. Hypothesis 2: Organizational justice perceptions will strongly predict satisfaction with the agency as a place to work.
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Masterson (2001) proposed a ‘trickle-down’ model of justice whereby employees’ perceptions of fairness should affect their attitudes toward the organization as a place to work, and positive attitudes to the organization should, in turn, encourage positive behavior towards ‘customers’. According to this model, identification with the organization will in and of itself promote the types of organizational citizenship behaviors – good customer service – that further the interests of the organization. Transferring this basic model from a retail context to the context of policing is, however, not straightforward. Much theoretical and empirical study suggests that aspects of police operational culture run contra to a service model. In other words, it may be perfectly possible for officers to identify strongly with the agency, but to subscribe to more traditional crime control values. Consequently, although we envisage justice perceptions as strongly predicting satisfaction with the agency as a place to work, we predict that there will be no association between satisfaction with the agency and attitudes to serving the public. Hypothesis 3: Satisfaction with the agency will not directly predict positive attitudes to serving the public. Commitment to the organization may, however, show a positive association with organizational reform programs designed to influence the way officers interact with the public. Tyler and colleagues (see for example Tyler et al., 2007) would suggest that procedurally fair treatment fosters organizational legitimacy in the eyes of employees. Legitimacy, in turn, encourages employees to comply with organizational policies. Unfortunately, we did not have any direct measures of legitimacy. We would, however, expect to see a relationship between measures of satisfaction with the agency as a place to work and commitment to a reform program such as community policing. Hypothesis 4: Satisfaction with the agency will be predictive of commitment to an agencysponsored reform program (community policing). It is also likely that organizational justice will have a relationship with commitment to community policing that is not mediated by feelings of identification with the agency. Tyler and colleagues (Tyler and Blader 2000; Tyler et al., 2007; Tyler 2011) suggest that, as well as fostering satisfaction and identification with the organization, procedurally fair treatment also promotes attitudes and values that include congruence between personal and organizational goals and the activation of personal motivations to perform well. Based on their finding that officers with positive justice perceptions received fewer citizen complaints, Wolfe and Piquero (2011) tentatively suggested that organizational justice may enhance implementation of organizational reform programs like community policing. We were able to test directly the relationship between justice perceptions and orientation toward specific aspects of community policing. Hypothesis 5: Organizational justice will be predictive of commitment to community policing. Finally, we suggest that commitment to community policing, whether fostered directly through justice perceptions, or indirectly though organizational commitment, will strongly predict positive attitudes to serving the public. Officers who see the need for community policing are likely, on average, to be more committed to a public service ideal, and more willing to see all citizens as deserving of police help.
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Hypothesis 6: Commitment to community policing will be predictive of positive attitudes to providing a service to the public. The six hypotheses defined above are summarized in Figure 1. We expect officer’s attitudes toward the public to be influenced directly by their assessments of organizational justice; we also expect, however, alignment with community policing to have an important mediating role. At the same time, we need to test the notion that satisfaction with the agency as a place to work will, net of organizational justice and alignment with community policing, have no association with attitudes toward the public. Structural equation modeling is therefore needed in order that the specified relationships can be modeled simultaneously (see below). Data and measures In 2009, researchers at the UK National Policing Improvement Agency designed a survey that would enable police forces to measure staff attitudes toward their organization and toward elements of their role. A rural force in England chose to undertake the survey and make the data available for secondary analysis. The force has traditionally been recognized as a leading proponent of community policing and has a stated commitment to community engagement, providing a high quality service to the public, and working in partnership to tackle crime. Questionnaires were emailed to all police officers, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), and Special Constables[2] (n=4410). All participants were encouraged to complete the survey at work, and 1,697 people responded, giving a response rate of 38%. Male officers were slightly overrepresented in the final sample (78% compared to 71% in the organization). Police officers were overrepresented (89% vs. 78%) and Special Constables underrepresented (2% vs. 14%). That Special Constables were underrepresented is not surprising: they are volunteer police and are more likely not to have been on duty when the survey was live. As Special Constables perform the same role as regular police officers, their underrepresentation is less concerning than if PCSOs had been underrepresented. Four key constructs were needed to test the research hypotheses. All were measured by survey items that used five-point likert-type scales with response options ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. First, we attempted to follow Colquitt’s (2001) four factor conceptualization of organizational justice. We tested two subscales that were subsequently combined to form a single organizational justice construct (see below). Procedural justice comprised a six item scale that asked about fairness in relation to provision of training, performance appraisal and career development, and how receptive people felt senior officers were to their views and opinions; informational justice was measured using five items that asked how well staff felt they were kept informed both by their supervisors and by the organization. We had no items suitable for measuring either distributive or interpersonal justice. Second, a three item scale measured officers’ satisfaction with the agency as a place to work. Third, alignment with community policing was measured by three items that asked about attitudes to specific aspects of community policing and working with partner agencies. Finally, three items attempted to measure attitudes to serving the public and providing a service to the public. Full question wordings are shown in Appendix Table A1. Findings Confirmatory factor analysis The first task was to confirm the robustness of the specified scales. We used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in the computer package Mplus 6.11. Mplus allows observed indicators to be treated as ordinal rather than continuous and was thus better suited to the type of survey
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data available for this study than other packages. As not all respondents had provided valid responses to all questions, listwise deletion reduced the final sample for analysis to 1,185. This final sample did not differ proportionately from the original sample in relation to either officer type or sex. We initially estimated a five factor model where organizational justice was broken down into two subscales (procedural justice and informational justice). While the approximate fit statistics suggested this model was an adequate fit to the data (RMSEA=.07; CFI=.97; TLI=.96) the two components of organizational justice had a covariance 0.86, suggesting poor discriminant validity. Though Colquitt (2001) supported discriminating between different conceptual aspects of organizational justice, many studies have in practice failed to make these distinctions empirically. Indeed, given that the conceptual distinctions between procedural and interactional justice are disputed by at least some theorists, it is perhaps not surprising that many studies have used collapsed justice scales. Since distinguishing between these two subscales was not important for the purposes of this study, we collapsed them into one latent construct labeled ‘organizational justice’. Factor loadings and covariances from the resulting four factor model are shown in Appendix Table A1. In this model, the error terms of indicators from the two organizational justice subscales were allowed to covary to reflect the fact that the relevant indicators related to slightly different concepts (a covariance was also allowed between the second and third community policing items). Model fit was adequate (RMSEA=.07; CFI=.97; TLI=.96). In the four-factor model, the covariance between the organizational justice and agency satisfaction measures was high (.82) indicating that these measures may actually represent just one underlying construct. To further investigate the scaling properties of the survey items available to us we estimated a series of four CFA models (see Appendix Table A2 for summary results). The first model specified that all the items loaded onto one underlying factor; the second distinguished between organizational and value dimensions (that is, between assessments of organizational justice and satisfaction with the agency; and attitudes toward community policing and serving the public); the third split the value component into the two scales outlined above; and the fourth was the full four-factor model already described. Models 1 and 2 were not adequate fits to the data, according to accepted standards (Byrne, 2012), but, as expected, the three factor model verged on adequacy (RMSEA=.09; CFI=.95; TLI=.93). The four-factor model was, however, still a better fit to the data, and we decided to retain four factors in our initial analysis (see below for more discussion of this issue). Structural equation model To test our research hypotheses, we estimated a structural equation model which included the four latent variables specified above. Results from the structural element of this model are shown in Figure 2. Taking each hypothesis in turn, the structural model first showed support for Hypothesis 1: organizational justice was directly predictive of attitudes to serving the public (β=.30, p=
